babies

Infants who don’t sleep through the night don’t seem to be at higher risk for cognitive or motor development problems, a Canadian study suggests.
Deciding when or whether to train infants to sleep through the night is one of the most fraught issues new parents face, with some previous research suggesting that insufficient sleep may lead to a range of developmental problems for babies. Less is known, however, about whether babies’ development is influenced by how many of their sleeping hours occur in a long uninterrupted…

PARIS: France's health minister has announced a new investigation into the births of several babies with upper limb defects in various parts of the country in recent years, saying it was "unacceptable" no cause had been found.
Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said she and her environment counterpart Francois de Rugy had decided to look more closely at what caused 14 babies to be born with stunted or missing arms since 2007, two weeks after health authorities said they had failed to find an explanation.
The cases have been…

WASHINGTON : Federal health officials are warning parents about the dangers of teething remedies that contain a popular numbing ingredient.
The Food and Drug Administration is asking manufacturers to stop selling their products intended for babies and toddlers.
The agency said Wednesday that various gels containing the drug benzocaine can cause rare but deadly side effects in children, especially those 2 years and younger.
Benzocaine is found in popular brands used to treat mouth sores in adults, including…

TOKYO: Termite exterminators working on a house renovation in the Japanese capital uncovered the bodies of several babies preserved in bottles, some with umbilical cords still attached, Kyodo news agency said on Monday.
Three or four such bottles were found beneath the floor of a house abandoned for the past three years, where an obstetrician had once lived and which was being renovated by a recent purchaser, Kyodo added.
The bodies appeared to have been preserved in a substance resembling formalin, Kyodo said, adding that…

WASHINGTON: Babies born in the world's poorest countries, most of them in Africa, still face "alarming" risks of death that can be 50 times as high as those in the richest countries. A baby born in Pakistan -- the country with the worst newborn mortality rate -- faced a one in 22 chance of death, according to a UNICEF report released Tuesday.
While the last quarter-century has seen broad improvements in older children's health, "we have not made similar progress in ending deaths among children less than one month old,"…

PARIS: A French mother was charged on Thursday with murdering five of her babies in a case solved by DNA evidence obtained years later after a brawl between neighbours.
Fourteen years after the bodies of four of the babies were found in a forest, Sylvie H., aged 53, has admitted to murdering five children, the public prosecutor in the eastern city of Mulhouse told a press conference.
The killings are believed to have taken place from 1993-1995 and 2003-2005. The body of a fifth baby was found at the suspect's home.…

Scientists have recently discovered that the fear of spiders and snakes is hereditary and babies as young as six months old feel stressed when seeing these creatures—long before they could have learnt this reaction.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Uppsala University recently made a crucial observation: Even in infants, a stress reaction is evoked when they see a spider or a snake. And this already at the age of six months, when they are still very immobile…

Two babies who were conjoined by their heads have successfully been separated through a surgery in Moscow.
At first doctors believed it to be a complicated surgery as they thought the babies’ heads were joined at skull, but then they figured out that it was only skin.
The scans taken of the twin girls when they were still inside the womb had suggested as if their skulls were conjoined but surprisingly it was not the case.
It took only half an hour to separate them and both are expected to make a good recovery.…

NEW YORK: Babies cry more in Britain, Canada, Italy and Netherlands than in other countries, while newborns in Denmark, Germany and Japan cry and fuss the least, researchers said on Monday.
In research looking at how much babies around the world cry in their first three months, psychologists from Britain have created the first universal charts for normal amounts of crying during that period.
"Babies are already very different in how much they cry in the first weeks of life," said Dieter Wolker, who led the study at…

CAROLINA: Two babies born at a South Carolina hospital were coincidentally named ‘Romeo and Juliet’, leaving everyone surprised and eventually drawing media attention to this extremely unusual happening.
They were born in different rooms next to one another without either set of parents aware of the strange coincidence that was about to beset them.
Morgan and Edwin Hernandez welcomed Romeo into the room at 2.06pm on Sunday.
Then 18 hours and eight minutes later Christiana and Allan Shifflett announced the…